Book News Roundup: Daniel Craig Set to Star In Purity Adaptation

Purity, the novel of 2015 by Jonathan Franzen, will become a television show for the American network Showtime, starring British actor Daniel Craig. The twenty-episode series will be directed by Todd Field (acclaimed for the film Little Children), and follows the post-graduation twentysomething California squatter Purity (‘Pip’) Tyler as she heads to South America as an intern. Craig is rumoured to play Andreas Wolf, the leader of the Bolivia-based internship project Pip signs up for.

In other book news:

The new Black Panther comic series, written by Te-Nehisi Coates and widely anticipated, has had a sold out print run in the UK, as well as becoming the best-selling comic issue in the US so far this year after its publication in April.

Irish author Anne Enright, her home country’s fiction laureate, is currently the frontrunner to win the Bailey’s Prize for Fiction. The winner will be revealed this week (8 June), and Enright will be up against Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life) and Lisa McInerney (The Glorious Heresies) among others.

Controversy has swarmed Marvel media this week after the surprising reveal in a recent comic book storyline that Steve Rogers, Captain America himself, is actually a secret double agent for the villainous organisation Hydra. Time will tell whether this is simply a promotional stunt to increase readership, or a truly well plotted game-changer for the character.David Mitchell’s latest finished book is taking a stranger journey to bookshelves than most. It won’t be released to readers until the year 2114, as part of the Future Libraries Project based in Norway, which selects one novelist a year to provide a piece of literature to the scheme (last year was Margaret Atwood). In 2114, one thousand trees that were planted in 2014 will be chopped down to make the then-100 books.

Do you feel like not enough attention is paid to the other side of book publishing . . . the actual, well, publishing? A BBC documentary, The Virago Story, is a planned hour-long show that will go behind the scenes of the womens-only press and its forty-year history.